Your librul media! Watch as the interviewer does his best to make Krugman look like a kook:
Watch Paul Krugman on Germany’s ‘Whips and Scourges’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Watch Krugman’s Solution to Fiscal Stimulus? It Involves Aliens on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic editor and blogger, quoting from Aaron Sorkin’s “deeply unpleasant, condescending and sexist” interview with the Globe and Mail:
“I think I would have done very well, as a writer, in the forties,” [Sorkin] says. “I think the last time America was a great country was then, or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.”
Coates thought Sorkin, in the interview, was insensitive to victims of segregation and “gender repression” back in the ’40s. He scolded Sorkin for extolling a great era that never existed, and for expressing “attendant notions that the internet [has] ruined everything.”
What a crock. In the interview, Sorkin betrayed a nostalgic streak and apparent insecurities about the quality of his work. But I’m still trying to figure out what it is about him and his new HBO show, The Newsroom, that so deeply offended Coates and the many Sorkin non-fans who posted comments on Coates’ site.
They all seemed to miss the main points Sorkin made in the first episode of his new show, especially in the initial rant about America’s decline, delivered by Jeff Daniels, playing (at least in this scene) a latter-day Howard Beale.
No cushion, no nothing. Welcome to our world:
According to research released Monday by Bankrate.com, 28 percent of Americans have no emergency savings whatsoever, up from 24 percent last year. About half don’t have enough money saved to cover expenses for three months. “Incomes are largely stagnant, so it’s difficult for people to make significant headway on savings when household expenses are creeping higher but incomes are not,” said Bankrate senior financial analyst Greg McBride.
TPM’s reminder that Mitt Romney is running a campaign that’s unimaginative, cowardly and dishonest, adjectives that sum up the man as well as the campaign:
Mitt Romney’s campaign asked Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) to downplay his state’s job growth after several press releases from the governor’s campaign and messages from the Florida Chamber of Commerce trumpeted gains for the month of May, according to Bloomberg News.
Florida’s unemployment rate dropped from 8.7 percent in April to 8.6 percent in May, though still significantly above the national rate of 8.2 percent.
A Romney adviser reportedly requested that Scott’s office say that Florida’s unemployment rate could improve faster under a Romney presidency, unnamed sources told Bloomberg.
The development is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the messaging predicament the Romney campaign finds itself in. For the Republican presidential nominee, the election is largely a referendum on President Obama’s handling of jobs and the economy…
No wonder Romney quickly resorts to doubletalk when anyone asks him where he stands on an issue. All of his eggs are in the same basket — our ongoing economic disaster.
Doesn’t it? I wonder if it will have a different ending this time:
Sir Mervyn King has announced emergency measures to help banks and boost business lending after a warning from George Osborne that the “debt storm” raging on the continent had left the UK and the rest of Europe facing their most serious economic crisis outside wartime.
In a joint proposal between the Bank of England and the Treasury, banks will receive cut-price funds provided they pass on the benefits to their business customers.
This new “funding for lending” scheme could provide an £80bn boost to loans to the private sector within weeks and alleviate growing fears of a second slump since the start of the financial crisis in 2007.
In a second scheme the Bank will begin pumping a minimum of £5bn a month within the next few days into City institutions to improve their liquidity.
Hahahahahahaha! “Provided the pass on the benefits to their business customers.” Of course, they won’t put it in writing and make it a condition of accepting the funds. They’ll just shake hands on it, these bankers are men of honor, after all.
(H/T to the reader who suggested this, whose name I can’t find.) From the Economic Populist, this piece explains how automated software is screening qualified people out of the job application process. While Mr. Cappelli is saying that companies are short-staffed and using software because of the overwhelming volume of applications, the real problem is that employers are demanding unrealistic qualifications and then blaming the applicant pool and the schools for the fact that they’re not offering enough of a salary to attract the high skill level they want.
This isn’t specific to this recession. When I was a recruiter, I saw employers turn into petty tyrants after 9/11, demanding absurd combinations of skill sets at lower wages because they were convinced they had the upper hand. Now, large corporations are using the inability to get qualified workers at slave wages as an excuse to bring in lower-paid workers from other countries. Progress!
Finally someone speaks the truth about U.S. employers claiming they just can’t find people for job openings. Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli has analyzed why employers dare to claim they cannot find people to hire when the United States has over 27 million people needing a job.
There is no skills shortage, none. In fact employers are being absolutely ridiculous in their hiring practices. It’s so bad, employers use software and third party rejection job application websites, which pretty much guarantee a candidate will be rejected. These websites and software are like virtual wastebaskets for your resume. No human involved, it’s automatic, guaranteed rejection. It’s so bad, an HR executive applied for his own job and was rejected.
A Philadelphia-area human-resources executive told Mr. Cappelli that he applied anonymously for a job in his own company as an experiment. He didn’t make it through the screening process.
Another factor that contributes to the perception of a skills gap is that most employers now use software to handle job applications, adding rigidity to the process that screens out all but the theoretically perfect candidate. Most systems, for example, now ask potential applicants what wage they are seeking — and toss out those who put down a figure higher than the employer wants. That’s hardly a skill problem. Meanwhile, applicants are typically assessed almost entirely on prior experience and credentials, and a failure to meet any one of the requirements leads to elimination. One manager told me that in his company 25,000 applicants had applied for a standard engineering job, yet none were rated as qualified.
Watch the above interview with Professor Cappelli on the real problem with employers these days. It is not that people are lacking skills, it is employers have impossible requirements.
We’ve written about this many times, so it’s thrilling to see a Wharton School Professor amplify the insanity.
A 2011 Accenture survey found that only 21% of U.S. employees had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years.
This is so obvious it hurts. If employers really wanted people, they would train them. That’s what employers did right up until the 1980′s or so. By 2000, companies wanted instant ready disposable workers.
Cappelli is hitting the press. The truth is employers do not want to hire U.S. workers, Americans. In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it’s cheaper to leave positions unfilled! Hopefully this time some employers will wake up, realize to grow a business, one needs people. Maybe some will actually train some people.
The challenge will be getting top leaders of organizations to admit they are a big part of the problem, and to change their ways. Software can be coded so it is less restrictive. Leaders could pay higher market wages where necessary. And they could make more investments in training. That costs money, to be sure, but so does leaving jobs open that could be of significant value to the company (not to mention the economy at large).
Judging from employers’ initial reaction, however, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. After writing the initial Wall Street Journal story, Cappelli heard from a few corporate leaders who told him there was really nothing they could do. He suggested he’d come out and take a close look at what they’re doing. “Nobody ever takes me up on that,” he says. “That usually shuts things up pretty quickly.”
So I’m sitting here while watching Jamie Dimon do his ritual apology in front of the Senate Banking Committee, and I have a tea towel tied around my head to hold the ice bag. I woke up with a throbbing headache, something I don’t normally get, and I’m pretty cranky about it. I’ve also had a stiff neck for three days, and while I do have some muscle relaxers, I can’t take them now because I’ll be useless for the rest of the day. (Thought: Why does Sen. Richard Shelby dye what little is left of his hair? It looks like he uses brown shoe polish. Is it because he’s convinced it makes him look younger to the lobbyist-supplied hookers? You don’t see Jamie Fucking Dimon dying his gray hair. The man may be a crook but he’s a confident one!)
Richard Shelby may be the Senate’s worst speaker, and that’s saying something. No, I take that back. Tim Johnson is even worse.
As the hearing started, a group of foreclosure protesters confronted Dimon, telling him to “face the people you foreclosed upon.” It sounded like some of the Very Important People in the room were laughing at them. Well, why wouldn’t they? No one’s going to steal their houses, or take their jobs.
This morning I found out I didn’t get one of the jobs for which I was interviewing. I didn’t think I would, and didn’t want to work there, anyway. But I need a job, and really soon. It’s all I think about, really. (That might have something to do with the neck.) I’m so worried.
I’m also trying to figure out if the yogurt I ate for dinner gave me the headache. It’s the sinus-y kind, where the entire upper half of my face and the top of my head hurts – hence, the ice pack on the head.
This is not a good day, and this is not a good country anymore. I have to figure out how to swim through it all.
UPDATE: Just to top thing off, just got a $100 ticket in the mail from one of the city’s red-light cameras. I feel like Job.
As James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And if people don’t start to feel things getting better, it makes it that much harder to get a win this year. Fortunately, polling shows that a substantial number of voters, even those who are unhappy with Obama, still blame most of the problem on Republican obstructionism—because with numbers like this, he’ll need every vote he can get:
The average American family lost 38.8 percent of its wealth from 2007 to 2010, with the biggest losses concentrated among households with the most assets tied to their homes, a Federal Reserve study shows.
Median net worth declined to $77,300 in 2010, an 18-year low, from $126,400 in 2007, the central bank said in its Survey of Consumer Finances. Mean net worth fell 14.7 percent to a nine-year low of $498,800 from $584,600, the central bank said today in Washington.“The impact has been a massive destruction of wealth all across the board,” said Lance Roberts, who oversees $500 million as chief executive officer of Streettalk Advisors LLC in Houston. “What you see is an economy that’s really very, very stressed for the bottom 60 to 70 percent of the population that’s struggling just to make ends meet.”
The declines in household wealth in the course of the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression have held back the consumer spending that makes up about 70 percent of the economy. Fed policy makers led by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke meet next week to consider whether the central bank needs to add to its record stimulus after employment grew at the slowest pace in a year in May.
The Fed has already taken unprecedented steps to boost the economy as it battled the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009, slashing its key interest rate almost to zero and purchasing $2.3 trillion in debt to lower long-term borrowing costs. Even so, the jobless rate has stayed above 8 percent since February 2009, compared with the central bank’s long-range goal of 4.9 percent to 6 percent.
“Although declines in the values of financial assets or business were important factors for some families, the decreases in median net worth appear to have been driven most strongly by a broad collapse in house prices,” Fed economists wrote in the report released today.
Here’s the video of the Netroots panel with Rich Trumka, Erica Payne, Paul Krugman and a couple of other people (warning: Long opening segment before the actual panel):
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